The Gambit PvEvP mode in Destiny is all about mastering spawn timers.
Gambit is also one of the worst and frustrating modes Bungie has ever developed
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gambit is launch ff14 tier ‘hold a press conference to apologise’ bad
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I, uh, disagree and don’t think it’s obvious why it’s bad, either
As for worst Bungie mode, stockpile
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part of this is because super turbo was the culmination of a series of games with an extraordinary culture impact that more or less invented competitive multiplayer gaming; quakeworld was a service/game with legitimately zero competition, made on the heels of the game that invented modern PC gaming; starcraft invented esports purely by accident and modeled the gaming habits of an entire country. etc. not to say that these multiplayer stalwarts are not great games, all three of them are unimpeachable classics, but their legacies owe a great deal to circumstances that are not recreatable. and the heritage of all of them combined is still dwarfed by league of legends or fortnite, which are the models for all the games you are thinking about.
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anyways not to be a crotchety old tran but this shit doesn’t even look like halo to me. all bleep bloops and little chirping dopamine noises with blue/orange filter
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I’m not a pro Halo player or anything but I had a lot of fun with Halo 5 multi for a decent amount of time; they mixed up the formula enough with the new movement options and the weapon balance felt more considered than it had for previous games (I have no idea if this breaks down at a high level).
Halo 5 does have timers that are important (invis and overshield come back 2 minutes after they are picked up) and a certain power weapon on each map is called out before it respawns. I think certain mid-level weapons (shotgun, etc) still have the “doesn’t respawn until it’s dropped” though.
Also the 60 fps feels really nice! It may not stand up to competitive scrutiny in the way that Halo CE does, but it’s pretty fun for a casual player and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that focus.
I mean, the biggest sin of recent Halo games is that there’s not really a compelling reason why they exist at all. It’s just one of only a few IPs Microsoft has that is still moderately successful, so they try to milk it for all its worth.
Although I do think there’s a point here too for how active communities (aka reddit) poison discourse and perception around balance in modern games. Players who think they can actively affect the balance of a video game will just complain until they get what they want, or stop playing the game altogether. Players who don’t have that delusion are more accepting of perceived imbalances and instead spend their energy and focus on playing the game and coming up with strategies that counter them.
Like a lot of these classic games were balanced “accidentally”. They have a strong original design, but some things are inevitably more powerful than others, and a lot of high level play revolves around glitches or techniques that the creators didn’t intend but it all still works out ok in the end. The push and pull that “active communities” create in game balance often end up making games very flat and boring.
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iirc this is sort of true in the case of halo 1 and sort of not; various halo competitive players have reached out to some of the original multiplayer designers, and while there are some unintended things in halo 1 (quick camo glitch and double-melee, etc) most game mechanics were actually intended.
here’s an interview with Hardy Lebel, the lead mp guy for Halo 1. around 31:00 he starts talking about his design philosophy:
a party game with shooter mechanics… something nintendo would ship, but a shooter… that affected the gametypes, the sound effects… because if we put that out, and people could sit down and play together, it would create a viral effect of people enjoying the game… as simple, accessible, fun and balanced as possible. which was a radical departure from [the original vision], like Battlefield, a military simulation… there were no powerups in the game until [I requested to add them] to create more flow through the static maps, like what are you gonna do in Rat Race?.. party game, shooter mechanics, bulletproof mechanics.
i’ve been trawling thru the Team Beyond forums for old times sake and when you apply Halo 1 principles and ideas, even in Reach’s forge mode you can get some interesting maps. Here’s one that reminds me a lot of Damnation.
I think it’s accidental in that Halo multiplayer was made in less than a year under very tight constraints. It’s an inheritor of a bunch of solid design from the time but with the amount of new things Halo was doing a lot of it is luck that it turned out as it did. Halo 2 had a roomful of people thinking about multiplayer for years on end, and did they make the core experience better?
halo 2 mp was a different vibe, its more focused on scale i guess, like actually attempting to marry the campaign design philosophy into the mp. halo 1 mp is simply marathon mp perfected, and i definitely have Preferences but i dont think its was a matter of making halo mp better so much as it was expanding on it. so many halo 2 maps are blood gulch sized and big team battle became the most popular playlist. halo 2’s mp is literally the only good thing about the game as well
No, the other good thing about halo 2 was being able to see Chief’s legs.
Real heads had already played a ton of Marathon deathmatch before Halo came out and knew that Bungie knew what they were doing
Oh yeah the other part of halo 2 that rules is how the two most badass guys from each team end up having to work together. The Arbiter owns.
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deathmatch is too nihilistic and indescriminate. I need comrades and allies
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Agree with Doolittle. Gambit is a good mode.
The main problem with Gambit is, unlike normal PvP, it’s not simple enough to be immediately obvious as to what you should do, and there’s no gentle onboarding (say, introducing the mechanics piecemeal) to acclimate you. They tried to make Prime to help teach people but it just ended up making people even more angry and called attention to teammates not knowing how to play.
I went on a long (like, 8 games I think?) winning streak running an optimal strategy with some friends of mine. The problem is you just have to piece the strategy together through painful trial and error, in a mode most people think you can win by just being efficient at add-clear.
As for spawn timers, that’s one of the reasons I like Doom 2016’s multiplayer a lot: it’s all about mastering the spawn timers of not only the myriad momentum-changing powerups, but also small pickups like armor shards. Map control may not be required to get a reasonable weapon loadout, but it IS required to play competently and not throw games.
I agree with everyone else re: Halo’s competitive balance, I think 1 strikes a perfect blend of goofy party game and hardcore arena shooter, and 3 is maybe the last great arena shooter. The herald of a dying genre I guess.
This is such a great point (minus the glitches part, I don’t find that to be true usually) and one I’ve thought about for years. You can see its influence in some other shooter games, but the gist is: don’t balance by making everything equal, balance by making everything strong.
In Halo, most weapons are strong in their particular niches, and mastering movement + weapon use is the way you dominate multiplayer games. Weapons are also clearly defined without much overlap, unlike games like Battlefield, Destiny, or some Call of Duty games. This gradually disappeared, particularly from Reach onwards, despite being such a great way to balance a game while ensuring people still enjoy it.
When everything is broken good, nothing is.
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the fact that gambit is supposed to be this casual mode they based an entire season of content around that was absolutely miserable to play with anybody but an organized group who understand an Optimal strategy is exactly why it fucking sucks
as with most of destiny the 12 year olds who play it and treat reddit like a court room make it a chore to enjoy for normal people. halo players in 2007 were 80% more normal than any of these kids
We might be disagreeing on semantics here, but I was referring to things like Quakeworld movement or Smash wavedashing or Tribes skiing; unintended consequences or quirks of the engines that give players that know how to exploit them big advantages.
I think maybe in common usage “glitch” implies a one-off or small scale consequence. I guess I’m talking about “systemic glitches” rather than small logical glitches?
I don’t think any of Halo’s glitches are as impactful as my examples above, but I mentioned them because I do think any glitch has the potential to change balance a lot, and it’s very hard to formally protect your design from them. You can only really be reactive once you learn about them.
In general I think modern games would benefit from a lighter touch on these types of “issues” unless the consequences of them are particularly degenerate. The worst thing about modern Blizzard games are these extremely “tight” designs where you can only play their games exactly how they intended you to.
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Ah, I see. In design parlance (in my experience anyway) this is usually called “emergent behavior”; the consequence of multiple complex systems interacting in unpredicted ways. Not a bug/glitch, but certainly unintended.
Definitely agree with you on Blizzard stomping these sorts of things out, which is a big problem I have with their design model.
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